Tweak a man to Fish

Ok, I’m still stuck on this sweet little line I heard in the land of the rich:  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a life time.” Here in East Timor it seems hard to find a person who doesn’t already have some skill.  When it comes to fishing, they already seem to know how to catch a fish.  I actually think this has broader implications than fishing.  Its part of this whole struggle that we have to know how to help these people (if we should help them at all) in the land some might call “poor”.  It seems to me that our greatest successes (on an economic development front) come from adding to what they already have rather than trying to teach them something totally new.  I find that improving the lives of these people is about listening to their ideas and dreams and helping them at the precise point at which they get stuck.  This might be providing a boat for a fisherman or a sewing machine for a lady or coordinating a building contract for a builder or a silo for a farmer.  Usually though, it involves more than just some simple injection of finance.  But the point is, its often not about teaching them something brand new.  For the boat and fishing saga, we have taken a slightly different tack and gone into trading.  We have found a young man, Tobias, who was labouring for us building bamboo fences.  He showed an interest in the outboard when I was washing it and it turns out that he used to bring fish from the island and sell it in Dili.  I am ever the one to try and knock off a few birds with the one stone so we ended up cutting a deal like this:  we trade rice, kero, plastic, Bibles and other things for fish and bamboo from the island.  You may remember that it is illegal to cut and bring in bamboo to Dili without appropriate letters (which are very difficult to get).  But there are no guards on the beach!  For us this solves a problem of getting our hands on a renewable building product and it provides food for the islanders without them having to use up their hard earned cash.  In a sense it opens up work opportunities for a number of fisherman and farmers on the island.  The catch is, can we make it financially viable.  On Tobias’ first run it was at a cost of $122 and he returned with $163 worth of goods making a humble profit of $41 which we split 50/50.  (We need to cover boat maintenance and he needs a wage).  Its not much, but its a vast improvement on the straight fishing venture which cost $115 and returned nothing (in large part due to the less than responsible Timorese man we were trying to help).  Tobias is also using some of the fishing gear supplied by Geoff, Nick and Graham.  He’s just finished he’s second run which we haven’t counted up but so far its looking ok.  There are still a lot of things to iron out before we can say its a winner.  For example, on this second run he tried to come back Saturday morning but got stuck in a rain storm and ended up arriving in at nightfall on the beach with a fridge load of fish which is quite hard to sell at that time.  He spent all Sunday trying to sell it and will still be trying to sell the fish today which is fast going bad.  This incurs extra cost of buying ice to keep the fish.  Also it goes hard against my religious grain of wanting to keep Sunday as a day of rest.  His trading meant he missed church on Sunday.  I said a prayer or two to the living God.  I believe He is merciful and we’ll definitely be looking for a better trading plan.  Oh, and on an environmental front, he brought back two good sized bugs (like crayfish) with massive egg sacks under the tail – oops.  Dont tell any of my hippy friends – I hope they are as merciful as God is. 

    Tobias seems an honest man and I pray that God will bless him hugely and we can find a way for him and the many families that will benefit from this concept.  So thats my take on the “teach a man to fish” line.  I am not sure that its so much about teaching them to fish but looking at the skills they already have and tweaking the process to make it work, perhaps thats it:  “tweak a man to fish”

Thanks God for Friends

Geoff, Lynne, Chloe and Hannah have returned back to Darwin.  Their line was “use and abuse us.”  We hope that we accommodated their wish to some extent
They got involved in heaps of things that we were doing as well as doing their own stuff.  In our office we have a whiteboard with an eclectic mix of various jobs.  They were happy to check out the list and attempt to cross some off.  Here’s a few of the other things they got up to not including the last post:
    Inaugurating the new table tennis set – Thanks heaps to Michelle for bringing it and Pastor Steve and others from the CRC church in Darwin.
  Going snorkelling, Geoff gets his first crayfish!  
One of Lynne’s tasks was to try to get my accounting all in order which turned out to be quite difficult as most of it exists in that mysterious grey matter between my ears. However, with great perseverance she managed to pull together a very snappy looking excel file on our Bible distribution accounting. I am very grateful for this work and have enjoyed entering figures into it and seeing how the finances are also travelling in this area. Just for your info (and hopefully trying not to boast) we have distributed around 1600 scriptures since August. I’m still yet to enter the data for previous months.

Helping out at Atabae with Celia and Polyanna in a minsitry with WEC.  They got involved in kids activities as well as posed as professional plumbers.
  Assessing the big catch, which unfortunately was not on Geoff’s line.  This was a decent looking Marlin hauled in by a local guy in a tiny dugout canoe with a timber paddle.  Impressive feat!
Geoff was called upon to take our neighbour through the hairy streets of Dili to hospital.  She unexpectedly went into labour after some complications.  Both mother and bub survived (despite Geoff’s driving ;)  ) to deliver a beautiful baby boy.
being friends
    having fun at the markets
   sharing sunsets on our beach
 Geoff saw everything as a potential lure for those illusive Timor fish.
One of Geoff’s main goals was getting that little fishing business off the ground. It could be described as a dismal failure if you’re feeling dismal but I’d rather see it as one of those learning failures. Its like what you just have to try in order to realise its not going to work. I think one of the difficult things for Geoff was the lack of application coming from the main Timorese man he was trying to help. Most times we had to go and get him up out of bed to go out fishing. Financially it was a bit of a loss. So Geoff and I did a lot of talking about how to go forward and how to make the most of the cool things such as the sounder that was donated. Lets just say that the challenge is still out there for a keen fisherman to come and find the fish!
Assisting in agricultural development on the island of Atauro
Getting close and personal travelling in our 2 seater suzuki – 8 bodies!  (Truck is on the blink again)
Making 5 cupboards for the Kids Ark school – a massive job.
In their last week, Michelle, a friend from Darwin, also came to see life in Timor and lend a hand.  We thank Michelle for the goodies brought from the Darwin CRC church.  We also thank her for organising our keys, lending a hand in the kitchen, looking after the kids and getting involved in many of our activities.
              
Thanks heaps guys!        

Some other friends…

During all this mayhem we had another two visitors from Brisbane – Rod and Rob.  This made a fairly full house of 12 people for a little while.  Rod is a physio and was able to get around to a number of different institutions to talk about the possibility of bringing teams over next year.  Rob is a chippy (carpenter) and I sincerely appreciated his help in making shelving for Bible and medicine storage and an awesome desk in our office.  They also donated a printer to replace our last one that died.  Its big job is to print resources for our Bible distribution and in the last two weeks has printed around 100 kids activity books to go with the gospel of Mark.
Thanks guys, your visit and your prayers were very encouraging.

The Catch

 
Geoff and his Timorese fishing buddies came back! Now that’s a good thing. The boat came back as well which is a bonus. Now we’ve got to look on the bright side of things because, well, they didn’t catch a staggering amount of fish. The 3 day voyage cost $115 in fuel, bait, tackle and ice and they came back and sold the fish on the beach for $65. Hmmm...the maths doesn’t quite work in our favour. We got one free fish out of it too. I suppose that's something. Geoff had a great time experiencing island culture but it was very tiring trying to sleep out on the boat in the water. So what should we do? The Timorese man, Gomez, has asked to keep the $65 to plough into the next trip – fuel, ice etc (He still has the tackle and he caught his own bait). The seas are good, probably the best they’ll get all year. If he comes back with $65 worth this time you’d think it was hardly worth it. But perhaps there’s a bigger catch – where Gomez sees the love and concern we have for his life to go to this extent to raise him out of poverty. Who knows? The big man upstairs. I can just hear him bellow now – “Throw your nets on the right side of the boat!!!” May God give us wisdom in this difficult case.
Other things that have been plugging along are the women’s sewing group bellekria. They have been going to the weekly markets in Dili. Our construction team got some Australian investor to put up money for another building. Bible distribution is rising up from a sleepy period and looking exciting. We are working with a small Catholic team and they sold around 150 scriptures at a recent youth conference.  I just bought another 180 New Testaments. We hope to go up into the mountains tomorrow to distribute Bibles in a school and help them in a few other ways. 
  

To Teach a Man to Fish

The title to this blog seems a little sexist in this post, post modern world but that’s the way the saying goes. You only ever see men here in East Timor fishing. Have you heard the saying before? “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a life time.” Generally we nod and say true, true – I never thought I would become embroiled in the literal application of the meaning. Its a lot more involved than a one liner. First we got a boat which just happened to come our way on a very good deal. Then it turned out the Timorese guy didn’t really catch a lot of fish with it. Then I worked with him to put a roof on the boat, print business cards (diversifying) and appoint a marketing manager. Still no luck. Now we have Geoff to save the day! He has come from Darwin with his wife and two kids. Geoff is a keen fishermen and is eager to go fishing with our Timorese fisherman, Gomez. More than that, he has brought a sounder and a GPS! This means we can identify good fishing locations by looking at underwater formations and mark the position with a GPS. It might sound like cheating to some people and perhaps a bit of a leap from dugout canoes to the 21^st century. We’re not saying we’re doing the right thing but we’re just having a go at helping a guy put food on his table. So the boat is rigged up with the sounder, GPS, lifejackets, old fridge for icing the catch, a 12V light and some pretty good tackle. Geoff has switched his thinking from fishing for sport to fishing for survival and they are off on a three day journey to the island to catch as much fish as possible. They’ve been out of phone range for 2 days now so I hope it is all ok. Thanks heaps to those people who have put in to support this venture. Lets see how many fish they catch and then ultimately whether Geoff can “teach a man to fish.” (Even if they don’t speak a common language – minor detail).

Nautilus 63 – Fishing in East Timor

 
Late last year we acquired an excellent fibreglass fishing boat with a near new 15Hp Yamaha motor. 
We have a two-fold purpose for this:
1. Provide Samuel with transport to various places on Atauro Island where he assists some communities
2. Start-up a small fishing business with a local fisherman
There is a 3km deep channel just off the coast of Dili which holds some promise of bringing in big fish.  The locals fish with fishing line wrapped around a piece of wood or in shallow areas with nets.  We think there is potential for the locals to be taught how to fish for the bigger fish out in deep water and make a decent wage.  What we are looking for is someone who knows how to fish to come and show them how its done and set them up with some tackle.  We can provide very affordable accommodation for someone to come to East Timor for a week for the express purpose of going fishing.  Or a group of fishermen could get together and come over on a fishing trip to help teach the Timorese. 
You know the old saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”  I now give you the opportunity to act.
Please contact us for more details if you’re interested:
samuelbacon1@msn.com